


Feint

by spicycronch



Category: The Property of Hate
Genre: Gen, Post-Ending AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-15 22:49:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17537795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicycronch/pseuds/spicycronch
Summary: Sequel to Atrophy.Hero grows up and writes a letter.





	Feint

**Author's Note:**

> Second person is f u n.

_ I never understood why people write letters to people that couldn't read them. I don't know if the one I want this to reach is dead or realized or something else, but maybe if I get all the thoughts together then they'll reach him, somehow. _

When he tells you to be wise the first time, you freeze. You do not know whether to get mad or to cry or to just ignore it. The part of you that is still six and vulnerable despite the unknowable years you spent adventuring grabs ahold of your hesitation, strikes you with an impulse so fast and then you are hugging him. He tries to console you, mistaking your grief for shyness and your nostalgia for worry. He makes a little sound, an  _ ah _ that opens up the hole in your heart that never healed. It’s just school, he says, and I’ll be back as soon as it’s over. You don’t pretend to be okay, but the fabric of Roy’s jacket slips through your fingers as he leaves. You still can’t let RGB go.

Panic overtook you the first few days after returning. RGB hardly knew what to do with you, you cried so much. Your parents, your old home, everything was gone.

He gave you journals and asked you to draw whenever you started feeling sad. You saw the plea for what it was, though you didn’t have the words to describe it. It wasn’t being sad, you’d insisted. You missed your friends, your family. It hurt to realize that your family meant candy birds and instrument amalgamations and sentient socks more than it meant real people. No one listened to you or cared about what you lost.

He never told you to be safe. It was always “be wise”. You always thought it was ironic, but wondered how much of the world you dragged him out of lingered. Sometimes he is Roy. He is every inch your father, an actor at the local playhouse with a terrible fashion sense and even more terrible parenting style. He badges you to eat your vegetables and drives you to tennis practice every Sunday. He films your matches. You are suitably embarrassed every time and yell at him to stop, shame creeping up on you with every flubbed pitch, but he never listens. You trade tennis for dance soon after. 

You grow older, grow wiser, and realize that the two do not go hand in hand. You understood that your friends' names were not what you called them- Julienne, Melody, Assok. TOby and Dial even, but you didn’t know how to even begin finding them. You wonder if RGB led them down the rabbit hole the same way he did with you and if they ever made it out of that wonderland. You don’t know how you would even begin looking for them, but sometimes you think you caught glimpses.

You didn’t understand it as a child. It didn’t end in a climactic rush, not with battle or with smarts. Instead, it ended as quietly as a whimper. 

All flowers must die to complete their purpose. You’d understood that he was hiding the thorns underneath his petals of lovely words.

You loved him. You never forgot about going home, but you loved him as fiercely then as you do now. You wonder what would have happened if you managed to grab on to the others, wonder if they are in your life now. It’s during one of your midnight cries that you realize that there was no way for them to let you know that they were okay.

He’d explained it to you. Whether realized or faded, the character would not remember the world before them. 

Even if this world remembers them.

So you start practicing loss. You lose something every day, make a habit of it and learn to let it go. Today, it’s your keys. Yesterday, it was your name from before and last week it was the exact shade of RGB’s plastic casing. Tomorrow, you think you’ll lose the places you intended to travel or how you and Assok met in this world. 

Maybe if you pick what to lose enough times, then you can hold on to the things you don’t want to let go of.

_ I used to worry about my drawings and if they'd drag the people I cared about away from everyone they'd loved. Or maybe worse, remembering them in the Land of Make Believe trapped them there forever and they had to watch the friends they made leave one by one. _

Death didn’t come when you were stabbed. You stayed when, looking back, you should have suffocated or drowned or any number of things. You believed that you were alive, and therefore you were. You wondered a handful of years later, in the depths of your teenage angst, what would have happened if you gave up in the final moments. You kept your hope alive in that world, thought it into existence. You wonder if you trapped those characters in that wonderland, if any of them made it out when their existence was dependent on not existing in your world.

It couldn’t be. No, you saw a few characters from the market turn into side characters of an excellent video game some ten years later and one of your favorite book's main characters took care of Assok while you fought with RGB. They made it out, didn’t run out of inspiration. 

You take up finger-painting again and start with scenery. It’s safe. You’re not risking trapping anyone, and the oils stain your fingers bright, unnatural shades that burn if you don’t wash them off quick enough. You could switch to watercolor, but somehow that feels too distant, think of bright cyans and vibrant magentas. It’s thinner than blood but thicker than water, too much to handle. The inspiration burns you from the inside out, and you wonder if other people find inspiration so hard to grasp. It’s everywhere for you, in the air and in the ground. Anything from the majesty of a symphonic orchestra to the slight give of an overripe grape gives you something to birth into the world. Painting underneath a tree or writing in its shade, you wonder if it’s because of your time in the world of imagination. 

_ I was scared to talk about any of it, scared that no one would believe me. _

You are clumsy and unwise in your first attempts and don’t think about the future consequences. You call him by his name- his  _ real _ name- and watch as his eyes glaze over. They clear up almost immediately after but you notice, you notice everything. You try again, shout RGB’s name, beg him to remember and when that fails you tell him about the World of Make Believe. He doesn’t hear you.

You think you’ve mastered the art of losing. You already lost quite a bit- your mother, your father. You’ve lost an entire world, and now you've lost the only link to the past you had. Briefly, you feel a flash of anger. You lost nothing, it is the world who has lost you. You fell out of time’s pocket and rolled underneath the bed, forgotten and dusty with the other unwanted toys. 

It takes time. You are wiser when you realize the difference between Roy not listening to you and Roy not hearing you. He does the former often- when you are eight and chasing after the ballerina dancer, when you beg your music teacher to teach you every brass instrument you can even vaguely make out, when you want to wheedle your way into staying up later- and it is frustrating. He does not hear you only when you bring up the lands of imagination. He stares at your paintings of Before longer than any others and you watch his face for any sign of recognition, a brief flash of resonance that reverberates in his head before fading into obscurity. You think of dog whistles, infrared lights. There’s enough of a presence to be felt, but his memories of before cannot be seen or heard by either of you. You wish you had asked him about his past before you left that dream-like place and wish you had the forethought to commit every detail to memory. 

_ I realized though that I would be protecting them. Everyone I met when I was with him would never run out of time, and until their stories needed them they would be safe. _

You finally work up the courage to paint Assok. It's laughably easy and you end up filling the entire canvas with your friend's smiling face, painfully familiar to the person that you walk home with. Soon you fill an entire sketchbook with drawings of the little guy, then work your way through everyone you ever met. Julienne and Melody came next, then Dial and TOby and Madras. Everyone from the phonograph vendor to Time kneeling on the moon ends up in your work, and you breeze through art class with your remembrances. You have no future with them, so you stick to memories. But with that memory comes anger.

_ Somewhere along my journey, I realized that even my story wasn't safe. I didn't think I could actually fail, but I thought that if I didn't succeed the first time then I'd lose everything. Maybe by the third try, I'd have no one left but me and an empty, lonely world.  _

You're 13 when you wish you had forgotten. Your bones don't fit right and you feel out of whack. You spent so much time in this body and hardly grew for years after you returned, so changing at all feels wrong. You feel older than you are and are tired all the time.

_ That would have been what I really hated. _

In a fit of rage, you throw all your old sketches into the trashcan. A week later when you're regretting it, you find that RGB picked them out and stashed the bag in your coat closet. You’re filled with so much regret that you throw yourself back into art. You offer up your heart to that place, let your pens and brushes sketch out the curve of the soil and how the trees melt under a burning sky. There is comfort now in preserving your memories.

_ But we didn't fail. We won and now I'm home and even though I can't go back to the way things were before, I'm okay. _

_ I'm not alone anymore.  _

You're accepted into an art college abroad. You weren’t really thinking ahead and it's expensive, but between scholarships and the trickle of money you manage to get from selling prints you manage to get through your first semester. The life you build for yourself is between the past and the present. The future is too much most of the time and you burn yourself out trying to figure it out. So you focus on what’s right in front of you and lose what's beyond.

Maybe you’ll call your father. You know he’s been having a hard time since you went away, love him dearly despite the distance. The distance makes things infinitely easier, infinitely more wonderful to come back home and slip back into the role of child. Child is, after all, a  _ what _ and not a  _ who _ . 

It’s a little painful to think about sometimes. Whoever you were before is gone, and  _ you _ are all that's left. You on different names, different styles, different clothes to figure out what you want to be. Appearances mattered. You remember RGB’s advice to Click, the importance of style. It was one of the little things that stuck with you, despite the garishness of RGB's suits and how some of his outfits hurt your eyes back then. But you take the words to heart and carefully carve out your place in this world. The one you left behind reveled in abstractness, lived and breathed in uncertainty. You use that to your advantage, your familiarity with the unknown, and remake yourself in your mind’s eye. The nice thing about being a what, you suppose, is that you can be who you want to be. Inevitably though you find yourself attracted to the color green and clothes that let you move as you please. Even if you could lose that, you don't think you want to. It’s fine to be who I want to be, you tell yourself. You say that you are happy, and at some point it stops being a lie.

_ Even if I'm the only one who remembers in this world, the ones I left behind remember me. The story is in there somewhere, I just have to find it. _

You grew up. And after you graduated and moved back home, you moved on. You tell the story of your childhood through your work.

_ He told me once that people are stories, and that's the most terrifying thing. But stories don't end when people die. Maybe their stories end when people stop remembering them, or when whatever change they made fades away into nothing.  _

Sunday dinners are spent at your childhood home. It’s routine and familiar, so you instantly know that something is off. He is different. You worry he’s in one of his episodes again, wonder if you should speed it up, let him pass out and then return to normal. He calls you  _ Hero _ , and his voice is strained. 

_ I think our story won't ever end. _

He makes oblique remarks that make too much sense. It wasn't the first time, and it was why you'd thought he'd come back so many times as a child. You offer him one of your paintings, a bleeding color bar across a black background, and tell him it's his. He smiles and says “it's me”, grins like he's made an especially witty pun, mutters to himself when you don't react. You roll your eyes and try to stop your hands from shaking.

He fades in and out and can't seem to remember how old you are. You come back one Sunday and find that he's brought you another journal, an exact copy of one you lost eight years ago. He tries to pass it off as a silly mistake, something hie did for old time's sake. His eyes flash with far too many colors, but then they're back to gold. You take the journal.

_ I have to keep looking. I know that it'll hurt and that I might not get exactly what I want, but he's in there somewhere. _

You fill the journal up with homesick letters, waxing from raging at RGB for leaving you behind to begging him to just leave once and for all. If he can't break through, then just let you move on. 

Your dad gets sicker as you write. You realize that it's what's driving you to beg in the first place and you move into your old bedroom for a few weeks. He coughs all the time, wakes up sometimes and doesn't recognize his face in the mirror. When you notice him scratching his wrists until they're red and raw, and you've had enough. 

_ RGB's memories are just stuck, so I'll look for him. I can set them free, and I'll search until the sun falls down. _

I’m scared, you say and backtrack when he looks stricken. I’m scared  _ for  _ you. Then you sigh and lean back. You keep your eyes trained on the ceiling and whisper, this has gone on long enough. 

What has, he says. For all his work in acting, your father is reticent and distant. He will let you go if you ask. Your heart pounds in your throat, choking you as you try to speak. 

Are you here or not, RGB? 

You half expect him to collapse again and have one of his coughing fits, but he keeps steady. He’s barely there, struggling to keep himself together, but he’s still  _ here _ . 

_ I know I could look at that person and tell him I have not lived in vain. _

You nearly launch yourself at him, hug him tight and suddenly you’re eight years old again, scared of the dark but not the monster that lurks there. I’m me, he laughs as he holds you tight. I’m me. I’m here. 

_ So to whoever might hear this, where or who or what- _

You're home.


End file.
